


Folie à Plusieurs

by koonutkalifee



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, M/M, Reincarnation, i think irwin is mentioned once, romance is barely there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-28
Updated: 2014-09-28
Packaged: 2018-02-18 16:27:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2354987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/koonutkalifee/pseuds/koonutkalifee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eren is five years old and does not want to go to school.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Folie à Plusieurs

Most of them are dead by the end of the final battle.

Mikasa is. Armin is. Jean Ymir Krista Connie Sasha. Hanji.

Eren. Levi.

Irvin stands above their corpses. Eren has Levi's bloodstains pressed into his cloak.

They are all buried together. Irvin thinks of their victory.

 

Eren is five years old and does not want to go to school.

His mother makes him, and he spends the whole time sitting and glaring at the rest of his class. By the time it is break time he has already scared off everyone.

He sits under a tree and thinks of wings.

There is a small blond boy talking to three bigger boys except they are not talking. One of the older boys grabs the small boy and Eren is furious, storms over and pushes him away and grabs the blond boy’s hand.

They both faint.

When they wake up later Eren has a new set of memories and so does Armin – because that’s his name, right? You’re still called Armin? Eren demands to know. Armin nods, lower lip trembling.

They talk about what they can remember. Glimpses at their life a thousand years ago. The grown-ups think they’re playing make believe, and Armin has to explain to Eren a thousand times why this is a good thing so he doesn’t storm off and correct them.

Eren’s parents are just glad he finally made a friend.

 

Eren is nine years old and the girl in front of him looks terrified. Both of them are covered in blood and there is a knife clutched in Mikasa’s too-small fist. The corpses of Mikasa’s abductors are laying on the floor near to them.

Eren starts shouting, not words but noises. The police find them like this, two shaking children and three adults worth of blood staining the floor.

They found the bodies of Mikasa’s parents. She tells the police she watched them die. Eren makes her take his scarf.

It is when his fingers touch her neck that they remember – Mikasa is flooded with all of the memories Armin unlocked four years ago and some newer ones added. Neither of them pass out this time. Perhaps they are stronger now.

Armin remembers too. He remembered as soon as Eren touched Mikasa.

Mikasa comes to live with Eren.

 

Eren is fifteen years old and doesn’t want to go to high school. Armin and Mikasa glare at him, Armin timid and Mikasa scary, and he picks up his backpack and goes.

Connie and Sasha are in his homeroom class, and more memories are triggered when he lends Connie a pen, their fingers touching as it’s passed. He nearly falls and grabs onto Sasha, and all three of them are hit with a whirlstorm of memories, of the training camp and of everyone they lost.

(Connie and Sasha are twins now, and Eren cannot help but feel relieved that no matter how strange things get, Connie and Sasha will always be close.)

There’s still so much missing.

Armin texts him seconds later; he’s in homeroom with Mikasa and both of them felt it when Eren fell into Connie and Sasha. Minutes later the five of them are stood in a too-crowded corridor and all five of them want to collapse.

They carry on with school.

 

Six months later and Eren literally punches the memories out of Jean. He hits him in the face and knuckles cracking into skin is enough of a trigger for the memory stream. Marco pulls Eren away and gets hit with memories too, and the three of them stand panting in the corridor.

Everyone is baffled.

 

It’s Sasha that runs into Christa and Ymir, although she’s unconscious at the time and so it doesn’t really count. She fell asleep at the school library and Christa finds her. Ymir sees Eren passing by and grabs his arm. She doesn’t faint. When Christa moves to shove Eren away she does though, and so does Christa. Eren is left with three unconscious girls, although Sasha is awakened by the memories crashing through.

Later, Armin says that it’s because Eren’s touching people only triggers their memories of them, and only to people who’ve already triggered things. He thinks it was because Eren was the coordinate. Armin was always smarter than Eren.

 

They talk about it.

They can all feel the pieces missing, and yet they are content, although the memories give them nightmares. Armin calls it _folie_ _à_ _plusieurs_ , and a part of all of them knows what they have shouldn’t and can’t exist. But it does and they deal with it.

The nightmares are the worst part. There’s always someone else awake though; a green light on facebook or a tick with a _seen_ written under the last group text sent. It helps.

They only get their own memories back, although most of them get shared. They’re all relieved by this though; none of them want to face everyone else’s nightmares as well as their own.

Armin has hundreds of theories and guesses and assumptions. He thinks it’s a closed loop, that they won’t meet all of the people they used to know. They all remember Annie, and a few others that they couldn’t bear mentioning. Most of them were killed in front of one of them after all.

Eren knows there are still people he hasn’t met yet. It kills him. Part of him wants to search for them and part of him never wants to see anyone from that life ever again.

He loves them all too much for that though. He wouldn’t want to live in a world without his family.

 

Mikasa turns eighteen first and the first thing she does is get a black wing and a white wing tattooed onto her back. They all stare enviously.

They all get one as soon as they can. Jean complains that he never wanted to be in the survey corps anyway. Sasha and Connie get theirs done at the same time, hi-fiving and whooping outside of the parlour. Armin grits his teeth and smiles through it, but is ridiculously proud. Ymir gets her wings and a few other tattoos besides. None of them are surprised. Marco says this is finally his chance to join the corps and Jean bursts into tears; they all do. Christa is so small that the wings envelop her entire back. Eren is the youngest, and gets his done last.

It’s permanent now. No matter what happens they won’t ever forget this.

 

It’s at a university open day that they meet Hanji – zhe lectures there, although zhe’s barely five years older than them. Zhe grabs Eren’s hand in a fit of excitement and collapses on the spot, but not a lot of memories are coming through for the rest of them.

They go to university open days together. There’s no way they’ll be able to part after high school.

Armin stands beside Eren above zher and whispers that there must have been someone that was always there when zhe was. Eren remembers flashes of experiments – zhe was a scientist then as well as now.

The black hole of what he’s missing is becoming more acute, more defined. There can’t be too many people left from that nightmarish time, Eren knows this. He can remember everything until he’s nearly sixteen, and then the holes start appearing in his memory.

He knows he died before he was twenty-five. But Marco’s already lived longer than his past self, and so he has hope.

Mikasa and Armin can see it drive him crazy, not knowing. He refuses to let it consume him, but it’s a constant presence in the back of his mind, the person he knows he may never meet.

What if he dies before he meets them and none of his friends recognise them? Armin tells him this is unlikely, and Mikasa hits the back of his head and makes him go running until he’s calmed down.

Eren thinks he doesn’t tell his friends he loves them enough.

 

Eren is nineteen years old and finally used to not living in his friend’s pockets and to his university courses and to how spectacularly fucked up his life is. He’s mostly adjusted and studying and although his course list doesn’t make sense it feels right to him. Everything feels balanced except the hole in all of their brains where the person he needs to meet is.

Jean tells him to let it go. Marco tells him that the person’s coming, and obviously that’s what Jean meant Jean are you listening to me? Eren laughs at them, and things go back to normal.

 

Eren trips. Falls. Lands on his knees and swears loudly, although his voice is hidden in the din of the corridor. He looks down at his scraped hands and swears again, a little quieter this time, conscious of the noise dying down as lectures start.

They have a guest lecturer today. Hanji had been ridiculously excited about him.

(Zhe’d got their wings tattooed on their back.)

Eren had agreed to sit in on this lecture, and he and a few others were hiding their smiles at Hanji’s babbling.

“Shut it, brats.” Had been how the lecture started, and Eren hadn’t been able to peel his eyes away from the podium.

Two hours later, Eren’s still dazed. He manages to wander out into the corridor and find his way outside.

He turns the door handle to get outside and looks down at his palm. Its scrape is still there from his fall earlier, and he can’t help but smile slightly at the thought of it steaming into healing.

“Are you just gonna grin at your hand all day? Move it, shithead.” Eren doesn’t register the voice, just the shove in the middle of his back, where his wings crossed. He hisses and spins round, palm smacking into the back of whoever’s hand was trying to push him.

He sees the face of the man who’d been giving a lecture to them not ten minutes ago before collapsing.

 

The black hole is filled.

The holes in their heads are finally healed and the strange, bloodied memories from their last life are finally complete.

Levi fits in almost too well. He creeps Jean out and gets on disturbingly well with Marco, terrifies Armin and pisses off Mikasa. Eren finds it all hilarious.

It’s not even a week after their memories come back in full that Levi grabs Eren’s face and kisses him roughly, kisses him with the promise of something more permanent than what their doomed lives could have in their life before.

Eren kisses back and they both hope.

 

They’re sitting in a coffee shop. Sasha is eating and Connie is mixing sugar into her coffee without her noticing. Mikasa is texting, Armin is reading. Christa is using Ymir as a pillow, and Jean and Eren are having a heated debate about something unimportant. Marco is watching Jean in amusement and Levi is leaned up against Eren and scowling at his coffee cup full of tea. Hanji is chattering away at zher phone, talking far faster than anyone present can understand.

Irvin pays for his coffee and leaves, smiling at the sight. No one notices him go.


End file.
